Digimon Pre Adventure Part 1

After the recent new trailers of both, the third Tri movie and Digimon Universe series being released, along with the announcement of Joshua Seth returning for the Tri dubbed movie, along with the dubbed release soon upon upon us, it's no surprise that I doing another post about Digimon. Digimon Adventure was what put Digimon on the map in terms of the popular children's franchise back then. But the anime wasn't the first attempt at trying to reach a mass appeal. What some may not know is that there were several material that were created that eventually led to the creation of the anime. Some well known and liked among the fans and some still a bit obscure.


                                  

Before Adventures, the first Digimon merchandise release was the Digimon v-pet that I'm sure most people know about by this point. The v-pet was created by Bandai to basically market a Tamagotchi leaned more towards the boy demographic. Along with taking care of your pet, you also had to pinned them against others in order for them to grow. As for as I know, only the first version came to the States. Up to 6 versions were released in japan along with several others as the franchise grew such as the Pendulum series. Most Digimon fans already know about the pets, but one of the more interesting things that doesn't seem to get much attention was the visual materials and manga that were created to promote them

The First Manga

The first one we will talk about is the booklet known as Digital Monster: I'll be the Digimon King. This was a guide book for the digimon v-pet  that came out on 1997. Besides it being one of the early materials, the thing in this book worth mentioning about is the illustrations. On the back of the book you can see early designs for the champion level digimon on the v-pets. These designs vary from resembling what the digimon look now to looking like there not even in the same franchise. My personal two favorite are the designs for Greymon and Devimon. Greymon the furthest from how he usually looks. His blue skin and grey horns actually makes look a lot like Veedramon, and is apparently the inspiration for Veedramons creation. Devimon also looks pretty different. For someone who is known to have a more scary and menacing appearance, this design is a pretty different contrast.

Here he has more of a chibi like body and come as more mischievous than menacing, reminds me more of Impmon or even Demidevimon. Along with the digimon, we get some of the early cast of humans companions. There are two boys(one blues, the other red) and a girl with yellow hair. Inside the book there is also a manga and a strange illustration of the cast dressed in sentai-like suits. Unfortunately I can't find a translation of the manga, but from the looks of it the manga is meant to be a tutorial on how to fight and take care of your v-pet.

C'mon Digimon

Next we have the manga C'mon Digimon also illustrated by Tenya Yabuno. This one shot manga came out around the same time the Digmon King guide was released and like that booklet featured a lot of what was to come of the Digimon franchise. The story was set in a world were instead of the digital world, digimon only existed in the v-pets where like the real life v-pets, people fought one another in order to raise the best digimon. One of the best digimon player is a character named Shinchiro Josaki who with his digimon Deathmon has not only beaten the competition but is somehow able to adsorb his opponents data and use for its own. The only hope the kids have is our main hero Kentouro Kamon and his digimon Bun. As mentioned earlier, this manga offered a lot for what was to come for the manga. This one of the first fully fledged out story for the franchise and even gave us an early deciption of what the hero Tai Kamiya will look like in the form of Kamon. Also unlike the anime series, the manga focuses more on promoting the v-pets merchandise something quite a few more digimon manga would continue to due when a new one was released.

V-Tamer

Next is probably the most well known and popular digimon manga: V-tamers. V-tamers is when we get our first introduction to the character Tai before he even made his apparence in the Adventures anime, that is if you lived in Japan as the  manga didn't really reach stateside until the show was pretty well known. This series focused on Tai(who I sometimes refer to as his japanese name Taichi to differentiate the two) who is instead of spending his time at summer camp before the adventure begins, is at a digimon v-pet tournament where his digimon is rejected for being considered a glitch digimon. Soon he his transported to the digiworld where he meets his partner, Zeromaru( a Veedramon instead of an Agumon) and Gabumon. Together they are ordered by a Holyangemon to stop an impeding doom that is about to plague the digital world and along the way meets other tamers and familiar faces. This is probably the first series where the concept of the digital world comes into play. Before this, the idea was that digimon only lived in the v-pets, that explores more of the idea of digimon living in a parallel world. Another thing that I thought was intresting was that this manga also gave us the idea of digimon having individual names( such as Gabu the Gabumon) something that is rarely explored in the digimon franchise. The manga is one the longest running digimon manga, and even continued well after the end of Digimon Adventure, leading to this Taichi to have crossovers with other goggled heroes such as Davis from 02 and Takuya from Frontier.

If any Digimon fans or even manga fans haven't read this manga yet, I highly recommend it. It is the first Digimon material to introduce a lot of digimon concepts that we come to know later in Adventures while having a lot of ideas that make it it's own thing.

To Be Continued
That about concludes part 1 of Pre-Adventures, were I covered the manga material that came before adventures. Look forward to the next Parts were I covered one of the first Digimon game and pilot that led to the adventure anime.